New online community and educational resources advance business modeling practices
TDWI World Conference Winter (Booth #504) – Las Vegas, NV – February 19, 2008
Multimedia and Industry Resources
In addition, the company is providing a number of resources, including white papers, podcasts and webinars explaining business modeling and how to use the new tool available at www.kalido.com/bmcf. Among them:
- Overview: How business modeling differs from traditional data modeling
- Podcast: “Business Modeling: Why It's Crucial for Delivering Fast, Effective BI”
- Webinar: “How to Build a Business Model” (scheduled for February 27, 2008)
- Webinar: “Back to Business: How Business Modeling Rationalizes Data Warehousing,” with industry expert, Neil Raden (scheduled for March 12, 2008)
- White Paper: “Business Modeling with Kalido”
What is a business model?
- A business model is a conceptual layout of your business that defines the core business entities, such as customers, products, time periods and measures, and how they relate to one another. The model also includes the business rules that bind these things together.
- Business modeling represents a significant advance over traditional data modeling approaches. Unlike data modeling, business models can be easily understood by both business and IT leaders, providing a common ground on which to collaborate.
- Independent of an underlying database, business models capture more semantics than a data model – for example, a business model knows not to add January and February balance sheet account totals together.
- Business models also assume that concepts can and will change over time (as they do in the business world). A single business model can serve as the unifying force between the multiple data models needed to design staging areas, data warehouses and data marts.
Kalido Business Information Modeler Highlights
- Easy-to-use graphical interface – Graphical modeling environment that transforms the design, development, deployment and maintenance of BI infrastructures.
- Improves Business-IT collaboration – Business and IT teams can design and create a business model much more quickly and intuitively than traditional conceptual modeling, requirements gathering and data modeling techniques.
- Faster time to value – Because the modeler and underlying warehouse allow you to go from concept to production rapidly, manual integration and handoffs between departments are dramatically reduced.
Business Modeling Community Forum Highlights
- Virtual collaboration across companies, geographies and industries - The online community provides a place for group members to upload, edit, download and collaborate on business models, discuss best practices and techniques and help each other on business-modeling-related issues.
- Pre-populated with common models - At its initial launch, the community already houses a number of business models available for collaboration and download, including models detailing profitability, time, contracts, geography and many other dimensions and types.
- Community-based to improve collaboration - Open to anyone, key forum participants will include data architects, solution architects, data modelers and business intelligence directors responsible for managing BI deployments in rapidly-changing enterprise environments.
Quotes
Attributed to Peter Lamb, data architect, independent consultant and Kalido Business Information Modeler beta user, Peter J. Lamb and Associates:
- "Kalido’s business modeling approach has always been an excellent way to obtain an accurate understanding of requirements through direct communication with business users. With the introduction of the new Modeler, this process has improved in a number of ways: It's possible to gain consensus more quickly through an easy-to-build graphical representation of the business, and we can reduce not only the initial data warehouse development time, but also the time it takes to alter the warehouse in response to business change. With its ability to reflect considerable detail related to reference and transactional data, the Modeler is a significant improvement over existing tools and will significantly reduce the time it will take to deliver value to the business."
Attributed to Bill Hewitt, president and CEO of Kalido:
- “BI is supposed to deliver clear, actionable information to business managers – a mission that has often been met with limited success. By using a business vocabulary to model how users see information, Kalido is removing a key roadblock to richer value from BI. By providing our Business Information Modeler as a free download, we can democratize business intelligence and ensure that business people have an equal say in getting the information they need to run their business.”
About Kalido
Kalido delivers active information management for business. Developed through years of successful best practice implementations, Kalido’s robust, business-model driven information management engine automatically feeds information to end users through their BI tools, making them more productive far more quickly and reducing internal costs. With Kalido, users never again have to wait for months to answer fundamental questions about business performance – which products are selling, which customers are profitable, and which markets are most promising.
Kalido software is implemented at over 250 locations in more than 100 countries with market leading companies. More information about Kalido can be found at: http://www.kalido.com.
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